What Are We Talking Here, Man Made Disasters or Natural Disasters?

Hur­ri­cane Earl

Well, while I am semi watch­ing a lit­tle TV this evening, I fig­ured I would bring up a top­ic that I sel­dom dis­cuss.  Nat­ur­al dis­as­ters.  In the past cou­ple years, nat­ur­al dis­as­ters have been front and cen­ter to every­one, par­tial­ly due to how swift­ly the media can get data on sit­u­a­tions and report on it.  I think as a group we like to fan­ta­size about man made sce­nar­ios, how­ev­er, some­times an all to real threat is the threat of nat­ur­al dis­as­ter due to weath­er, earth­quake, vol­cano erup­tion, tsuna­mi, swarm of locusts, killer birds, or some oth­er dis­as­ter that I may not be aware of.

I  talk a lot about Bug­ging Out, but what if that is not an option.  What if a Hur­ri­cane comes up the east coast and my place gets destroyed, my car gets crushed by a tele­phone pole, and we are out of elec­tric­i­ty, water, and food stor­age is scat­tered all over the place…  While a remote pos­si­bil­i­ty, it is still a pos­si­bil­i­ty that I need to be pre­pared for.  Con­cep­tu­al­ly, one should have time to Bug Out if there is a killer hur­ri­cane com­ing.  In the case of an Earth­quake, there isn’t much of a warn­ing one can get that is going to tell them to get the hell out ahead of time, so I sup­pose you deal with what­ev­er sit­u­a­tion you are in when the time comes.

The sub­urbs will offer much scat­tered debris that can be used in a sur­vival sit­u­a­tion, and with luck I would be able to pull my pack out of my truck, assum­ing my truck is still where it is sup­posed to be.

What spurs this post is the fact that Hur­ri­cane Earl is head­ing up the east coast this week.  In a con­ver­sa­tion with a friend today, a friend of mine hypo­thet­i­cal­ly asked, “What if Earl comes all the way up the east coast, does­n’t lose much steam, and hangs a left across Long Island into Man­hat­tan, and across the Mid Atlantic?”  Hur­ri­cane Floyd did this in 1999.  Pret­ty good hypo­thet­i­cal ques­tion, if you ask me.  Not because it was a hypo­thet­i­cal, but because it was both plau­si­ble and hypo­thet­i­cal togeth­er.   I have to be hon­est, I don’t remem­ber much about Hur­ri­cane Floyd.  It was 11 years ago, and I was in a dif­fer­ent place in my life.  I was­n’t pay­ing atten­tion to the worlds events the way I do today.

So, what if?  As men­tioned ear­li­er I have a good base of preps if the pow­er goes out and the grid is down for some time.  I would cer­tain­ly pre­serve the foods I have in the fridge and the freez­er.  Not that I would be here if FEMA were telling us to get the hell out of Dodge like they might have to in the South East in the com­ing days.

Ulti­mate­ly, it is wait and see, as it nor­mal­ly is in these sit­u­a­tions.  I guess I’ve bab­bled on enough for the moment.